* Posts by Simon Harris

2773 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2007

NAND the beat goes on: Samsung to fling out 96-layer 3D NAND chip

Simon Harris

Re: Exponential development

Bringing back memories of the 1980s...

Fill a 27C64 with code, plug it in, doesn't work, stick it under the UV lamp for a bit, reprogram with the corrected code... repeat as necessary.

Looking at Farnell and RS now, it looks like it's impossible to get anything smaller than a 27C256 (a size I could only aspire to when I started) and everything is one time programmable, no more quartz windows - I guess it's time to throw out the UV lamp!

Call your MEP! Wikipedia blacks out for European YouTube vote

Simon Harris
Thumb Down

Rejected!

MEPs have voted down the currently proposed legislation, but will revisit the issue in September.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44712475

Foot lose: Idiot perv's shoe-mounted upskirt vid camera explodes

Simon Harris

Will he learn from the error of his ways...

and in future remain in-step with the law and toe the line?

Drug cops stopped techie's upgrade to question him for hours. About everything

Simon Harris

Re: Arresting times past

Technically the crime is Contempt of Court to photograph a person in the court complex, so while it might not actually be unlawful to photograph objects (except evidence, possibly) I wouldn't want to have to explain myself from the other side of the dock. To be on the safe side, I'd probably ask first to do any inspection photography out of hours and with a chit from whoever's in charge of the court complex.

Simon Harris

Re: I order ed a book about computer veruses

Within an hour I got a phone call from someone in "intelligence" asking me questions about hacking and trojans.

"Give me a chance - I'll tell you when I've read the book!"

Simon Harris

Re: Arresting times past

Not just the Old Bailey - it applies to any Crown or Magistrates' Court - I got the same info in my jurors' instruction pack for doing jury service in Kingston not long ago.

Simon Harris

Re: Entering New Zealand

An impossibility of marketing managers.

User spent 20 minutes trying to move mouse cursor, without success

Simon Harris

Re: Not Millennials!

Generation X seems to have quite a flexible definition with a range of starting and ending dates.

If you choose the Harvard definition you can make it stretch to 1984, and might be able to call yourself a Gen Xer instead of a millennial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X

Simon Harris

Re: Sun optical mice, circa 1985

From Wikipedia...

"Early Sun workstations used MSC optical mice exclusively. Initial models came with large mousepads with well-spaced lines, while later models were smaller and used a much tighter grid."

They must have been using the tighter grid on the mousepad I had.

Simon Harris
Devil

Mouse balls.

In the old days, if I was feeling particularly mean to someone I might substitute their mouse ball for one from another mouse that was slightly smaller.

Simon Harris

Re: Sun optical mice, circa 1985

That was the first type of mouse I used (Mouse Systems Mouse) - I don't remember it being particularly jumpy though - I used to use it for schematic capture and PCB design with P-CAD in 1986/87. It came bundled with a painting program too.

Microsoft reveals which Windows bugs it might decide not to fix

Simon Harris
Coat

Re: Pay more, get less

"Now that Windows is SaaS..."

Surely that's BSaaS - Blue Screen as a Service.

Mine's the one with the recovery disc in the pocket --->

Yahoo! Kills! The! Messenger!

Simon Harris

I remember back in the early days of hand curated web indexes some of the entries were quite humorous.

When many of the early sites with pictures of naked ladies consisted of images brazenly scanned from Playboy, Penthouse, and the like, I remember one site being listed with a comment something like 'Collection of copyright violations', and the next one in the list being 'More copyright violations'.

US govt mulls snatching back full control of the internet's domain name and IP address admin

Simon Harris

"Do I have to go back to finger-ing the person before I meet them?"

These days I always sniff their packets first.

NASA spots asteroid on crash course with Earth – with just hours to go

Simon Harris

"Meteor 2018 LA seen from farm..."

Hmm... looks more like 'swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus' to me.

Half of all Windows 10 users thought: BSOD it, let's get the latest build

Simon Harris
FAIL

Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

I can't help but read that as 'Fail Creators Update' whenever I see it.

About to install the Windows 10 April 2018 Update? You might want to wait a little bit longer

Simon Harris

Re: Windows Schrödinger edition

"Is it alive or is it dead - you only know when you come to use it next time."

If Microsoft is going to enforce updates at a time of its choosing (at least for home users), maybe every copy of Windows should come with complimentary external storage large enough to back up the system drive and prompt to plug it in to make a backup before making the updates, on the off-chance that it's going to cock things up.

Simon Harris

Talking to my dad the other day (by phone, he's 50 miles away, so I'm only guessing), it sounds like he has the same problem.

Does the Windows re-installer wipe the desktop and user areas as part of the re-install or is all the old data recoverable afterwards?

You've got pr0n: Yes, smut by email is latest workaround for UK's looming cock block

Simon Harris

Re: One in the bush is worth two in the hand

"dumping what we no longer need under a local bush for other lucky recipients to find."

Will images on dumped media have to be passed through a 'soggy paper' filter to give them the authentic 'found in a bush' character.

Simon Harris
Angel

Re: Probably mentioned already but

Rest assured I was around that age.

However, I am slightly worried for my safety given that some members of the forum have given a thumbs up for my public spanking!

Of course I never did anything to merit a spanking -------------->

Simon Harris

Re: Probably mentioned already but

"When I was a kid my mother would have smacked me and locked me in the car for the behaviour I see in supermarkets and shopping malls."

My mother always threatened that if I misbehaved she'd 'pull my pants down and smack my bottom... even if we were in the middle of the shop'. (that was the early 1970s when that sort of thing was still allowed!)

Simon Harris

Can we have porn by SMS next...

With your favorite adult entertainment stars rendered as 160 characters of ASCII art?

It's Galileo Groundhog Day! You can keep asking the same question, but it won't change the answer

Simon Harris
FAIL

Re: Blue Streak mean anything to you?

Blue Streak?

I was thinking more along the lines of Nimrod.

Commodore 64 owners rejoice: The 1541 is BACK

Simon Harris
Thumb Up

Re: "6502 CPU and two 6522 processors"

looks like the article text has been corrected now.

Simon Harris

"Taking over two minutes to load a 64 kilobyte into memory was maddening."

Luxury - for those of us who only had cassettes back then, it could take that long to load 2K into memory!

Simon Harris

"6502 CPU and two 6522 processors"

Only one of these is actually a processor.

The 6522 is a 'versatile interface adaptor' - it could be configured in various ways with 16 bits of I/O configured as input or output on a bit-by-bit basis, it could input and outpt serial bit-streams and had programmable repeating or single-shot timers - and probably a load of other stuff I've forgotten now as I haven't used one in about 30 years! But it was never a processor.

Glibc 'abortion joke' diff tiff leaves Richard Stallman miffed

Simon Harris
Joke

Regional variations.

If there are going to be such jokes in the man pages, maybe man could check your locale to make sure the joke is relevant to your region, and substitute alternative jokes as appropriate. Maybe man could also include an AI system that scans news sites for information about legislation and governmental changes that might render the joke's satire out of date.

The Sun will blow up into a huge, glowing bubble of gas during its death

Simon Harris

Re: 40,000 Kelvin

Bet it still rains though!

Simon Harris

You mean the textbooks that previously said it would take a star with at least twice the mass of the sun to turn into a planetary nebula?

Europe wants cloud giants to cough up data from anywhere in 6hrs

Simon Harris

Re: I wonder what happens when they come up against that old chestnut...

"Fine, here's the data you wanted.

Oh, sorry about the encryption, but we really don't have the keys to decrypt it...

But I'm sure you have some nice big computers to do that... good luck!"

NASA's TESS mission in distress, Mars Express restart is a success

Simon Harris
Alert

Re: Brave

With Windows updates, I get nervous hitting the reboot button on kit infront of me!

Donkey Wrong: Arcade legend Billy Mitchell booted from record books amid MAME row

Simon Harris

Any scores should be invalid unless you have the detention chit for bunking off school to play the arcades.

Great Western Railway warns of great Western password reuse: Brits told to reset logins

Simon Harris

Re: We need a court action

Re-use should be expected.

My password manager shows ~802 passwords currently stored, with various sites having various rules about length, formation etc so horse-battery-staple won't work nor do I (nor most people) have photographic memories.

I think one of the problems is the number of places that force you to make an account when you shouldn't really need to before you can do anything. I've got usernames and passwords on theatre sites that I've visited only once because I couldn't buy tickets without registering (what's wrong with just saying here's my credit card, give me my tickets?*), and yesterday I missed a package from a well known delivery company - could I find anywhere on their website to reschedule the delivery? Not until I'd made an account with them!

There must be millions of user accounts floating around with names and passwords that have been used exactly once and subsequently been forgotten about - it's not surprising people can't be arsed to think up a new password every time.

* Of course, what's 'wrong' is that if you did that then they couldn't then spam you forever with marketing!

El Reg needs you – to help build an automated beer-transporting robot

Simon Harris
Coat

"automatically dodging any obstacles along the way"

So, some form of agile development process is called for.

Hat, coat, etc.

Simon Harris
Pint

Re: Alternatively

Last year I ate at a restaurant in Prague (Vytopna - it has a few other branches around the Czech Republic too) where drinks are delivered to the table by G-scale model trains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%BDtopna

Fear the Reaper: Man hospitalised after eating red hot chilli pepper

Simon Harris

Nominative Determinism?

These chillies were created by Ed Currie, according to the BBC report.

Capsaicin may have anti-cancer properties, and half the crop is donated for cancer research.

Gmail is secure. Netflix is secure. Together they're a phishing threat

Simon Harris

Re: "Google, however, has promoted it as a useful feature"

In the days before it became easy to validate post-codes, my dad used to use the last letter of the post-code as a postal spam filter, and could easily identify which companies were selling their contact lists to spammers.

Simon Harris
Facepalm

Secure account.

To make sure my Netflix account didn't fall prey to this gmail issue, I signed up with my Yahoo! email. Now I'm secure...

Oh... wait.... Yahoo! ?

Simon Harris

Tip of the iceberg?

I can think of many sites that require you to sign in with your email address (err.. including this one) rather than a separate user-name that could easily be tested for uniqueness.

I wonder how many of those are susceptible to this particular attack?

Simon Harris

Re: Will it really make any differece?

Is it possible to trick this?

Sign up to Netflix with a throwaway email.

Netflix sends the signup confirmation there.

Do the confirmation on that address.

Log in to the Netflix website using the throwaway address.

Go to account settings and change the email address to a dotted-variant of that of your mark.

That way your mark never sees the signup confirmation.

Simon Harris
Facepalm

Oh dear...

"Since the e-mail arrived to the correct inbox, and since it genuinely came from Netflix, Fisher came close to accepting its request that he update his details"

i.e. lazily ignoring the first rule of 'account update' emails, and not going directly to the site and typing in your own login credentials to check your account rather than relying on what's in the email.

Virgin spaceplane makes maiden rocket-powered flight

Simon Harris

Re: sub-orbital flight?

Not forgetting to invite Mahmoud Abbas onboard, to make it SEO in LEO with the ELO and PLO.

1.5 BEEELLION sensitive files found exposed online dwarf Panama Papers leak

Simon Harris

Re: Yep!

More a case of DevOops!

Facebook can’t count, says Cambridge Analytica

Simon Harris

"and didn't use any in the US election"

As Mandy Rice-Davies almost said, "Well they would say that, wouldn't they?"

What's silent but violent and costs $250m? Yes, it's Lockheed Martin's super-quiet, supersonic X-plane for NASA

Simon Harris
Devil

Who needs a full keyboard?

Just use ALT and the numeric keypad, and try to remember all the ASCII codes.

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Simon Harris

So, no swear words allowed in Word...

It's fortunate I don't use a speech recognition system then, or my Word documents would be full of them.

Slap visibility beacons on bikes so they can chat to auto autos, says trade body

Simon Harris

"implant them in every human so you can be tracked everywhere."

Unless you're wearing a wet towel on your head.

Simon Harris

Re: Not that much power

"An EPIRBS the size of my hand made from '90s tech could summon a rescue helicopter to the factory in Croydon"

Presumably to rescue you from the horror of being in Croydon.

India: Yeah, we would like to 3D-print igloos on the Moon

Simon Harris

Re: Problem?

Couldn't we cross-breed some Clangers and Wombles? That would solve the problem.

Simon Harris

Re: What to use as a binder?

Reversing the polarity seems to fix most things in space.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReversePolarity